I have been playing around for the last couple of months/years with insider preview and I thought I would share my feedback on the last 4 builds so far and what I personally have experienced.
These are the builds I will cover in this article:
- Build 18950
- Build 18956
- Build 18963
- Build 18965
So you may ask, why am I running preview builds of windows. Well firstly on a normal build around May I did the CU update and my camera stopped working and face recognition also wasn’t working.
These features I really enjoy using and jumped to the Insider Ring and updated my normal version to the insider one and this fixed my camera issue. Since then, every new feature that has come out is brilliant and makes it easier to work on windows 10.
Jumping to the Insider builds, this is what I found gave an issue on Build 18950-18963.
- Task bar would go transparent and you at times could not see the icons.
- Facial recognition on login after a cold boot sometimes would not work but after a short while it came back.
- Windows updates stopped working on Build 18956, I had to manually update to the next version for it to work normally again. Windows updates just kept on saying no new updates or error downloading updates.
- Applications like SnagIT would just quit or give an error, upon re-opening it then all would be fine.
- CPU would spike to 100% for no apparent reason and send the fans winding but would come down again.
- Different AV products played a role in how the machine responded on all 4 builds.
Other than the few things I noticed above, the machine worked fine.
Build 18965 has been good so far. Here are some small things that I have noticed so far:
- Black theme works nicely, however in Notepad it is still running with a white background.
- The mail icon in control panel does not detect Outlook 2019 and displays Outlook 2016.
- When setting up a new Outlook profile the font is distorted so words are cutoff.
- When closing outlook, the machine fans spin up and the CPU spikes to 100% and stays there until you force the task to close.
What is working great on this build and 1 previously:
- The ability to start an application in Administrator mode without having to right-click as it gives you all the options.
- You have better search functionality in the start menu.
- General feel of the current build is smooth, no CPU spike other than Outlook.
What would be nice to have in the upcoming releases of Insider Preview:
- If you running with the black theme and you launch office, it should ask you if you also want to switch to the black theme to match what you have in windows.
- Preview themes on the store before downloading and installing them.
- Highlight large files on windows without having to search for them.
- Add the functionality to find what is eating the space on windows so you don’t have to install 3rd party software to do that.
- Add a menu for storage on C:\ drive or other drives so you can go straight to a disk clean-up without a double hop.
- Remove the constant “Rate Me” option in Edge each time you open it.
Until the next build…